Cena zł 18,00 An International Journal An International Journal 23/1 An of English Studies of English Studies 23/1 Wit Pietrzak Breaking up the language: the struggle with(in) modernity in J. H. Prynne’s Biting the Air Dominika Oramus Two exercises in consilience: Annie Dillard and Kurt Vonnegut on the Galapagos Archipelago as the archetypal Darwinian setting Published since 1988 Joanna Chojnowska “It came up all the time, like a xation ”: the ubiquity of racially-based prejudice as presented in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia Kamil Michta The gardening fallacy: J. M. Coetzee’s Michael K as a parody of Voltaire’s Candide Joanna Jodłowska Aldous Huxley’s early novels: an unfolding dialogue about pain Debbie Lelekis “Pretty maids all in a row”: power and the female child in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden Almas Khan Heart of Darkness: piercing the silence Anna Budziak Parodic and post-classic, British Decadent Aestheticism re-approached Lucyna Krawczyk-Żywko The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde: a Victorian villain and a Victorian detective revisited Małgorzata Łuczyńska-Hołdys “Darkling I listen”: melancholia, self and creativity in Romantic nightingale poems Klaudia Łączyńska From masque to masquerade: monarchy and art in Andrew Marvell’s poems Abhishek Sarkar Thomas Dekker and the spectre of underworld jargon 2014 www.wuw.pl/ksiegarnia logo WUW.indd 1 5/12/2014 12:54:19 PM logo WUW.indd 2 5/12/2014 12:55:07 PM Anglica_OK_ 23-1.indd 1 16.10.2014 11:37 An International Journal of English Studies 23/1 Editor Andrzej Weseliński Associate Editors Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż and Anna Wojtyś Advisory Board Michael Bilynsky, University of Lviv, Ukraine Andrzej Bogusławski, University of Warsaw, Poland Mirosława Buchholtz, Nicolaus Copernicus University, Toruń, Poland Xavier Dekeyser, University of Antwerp / KU Leuven, Belgium Bernhard Diensberg, University of Bonn, Germany Edwin Duncan, Towson University, Towson, MD, USA Guðni Ellíson, University of Iceland, Reykjavik, Iceland Jacek Fisiak, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland Elzbieta Foeller-Pituch, Northwestern University, Evanston-Chicago, USA Piotr Gąsiorowski, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland Keith Hanley, Lancaster University, United Kingdom Christopher Knight, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA Marcin Krygier, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland Krystyna Kujawińska-Courtney, University of Łódź, Poland Rafał Molencki, University of Silesia, Sosnowiec, Poland John G. Newman, University of Texas at Brownsville, USA Michal Jan Rozbicki, St. Louis University, USA Jerzy Rubach, University of Warsaw, Poland, University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA Piotr Ruszkiewicz, Pedagogical University, Cracow, Poland Hans Sauer, University of Munich, Germany Krystyna Stamirowska, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland Merja Stenroos, University of Stavanger, Norway Anna Walczuk, Jagiellonian University, Cracow, Poland Jerzy Wełna, University of Warsaw, Poland logo WUW.inddWarszawa 1 20145/12/2014 12:54:19 PM Redaktor prowadza˛cy Dorota Dziedzic ISSN 0860-5734 # Copyright by Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 2014 Wydano z pomoca˛finansowa˛Instytutu Anglistyki Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego Edycja papierowa jest wersja˛pierwotna˛czasopisma Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego 00-497 Warszawa, ul. Nowy S´wiat 4 www.wuw.pl; e-mail: [email protected] Dział Handlowy WUW: tel. +48 22 55-31-333; e-mail: [email protected] Ksie˛garniainternetowa: www.wuw.pl/ksiegarnia Skład i łamanie Logoscript TABLE OF CONTENTS Wit P i e t r z a k Breaking up the language: the struggle with(in) modernity in J.H. Prynne’s Biting the Air. .......................................... 5 Dominika O r a m u s Two exercises in consilience: Annie Dillard and Kurt Vonnegut on the Galapagos Archipelago as the archetypal Darwinian setting . .......... 19 Joanna C h o j n o w s k a ‘‘It came up all the time, like a fixation”: the ubiquity of racially-based prejudice as presented in Danzy Senna’s Caucasia . .......... 31 Kamil M i c h t a The gardening fallacy: J.M. Coetzee’s Michael K as a parody of Voltaire’s Candide ............................................... 41 Joanna J o d ł o w s k a Aldous Huxley’s early novels: an unfolding dialogue about pain 51 Debbie L e l e k i s ‘‘Pretty maids all in a row”: power and the female child in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden . ............................... 63 Almas K h a n Heart of Darkness: piercing the silence ......................... 73 Anna B u d z i a k Parodic and post-classic, British Decadent Aestheticism re- approached .................................................... 83 Lucyna K r a w c z y k - Z˙ ywko The Strange Case of Mr. Hyde: a Victorian villain and a Victorian detective revisited . ..................................... 95 Małgorzata Ł u c z y n´ s k a - H o ł d y s ‘‘Darkling I listen”: melancholia, self and creativity in Romantic nightingale poems ..............................105 Klaudia Ł a˛czyn´ s k a From masque to masquerade: monarchy and art in Andrew Marvell’s poems . ...............................................115 Abhishek S a r k a r Thomas Dekker and the spectre of underworld jargon ..........129 Wit Pietrzak University of Ło´dz´ BREAKING UP THE LANGUAGE: THE STRUGGLE WITH(IN) MODERNITY IN J. H. PRYNNE’S BITING THE AIR Abstract The essays focuses on J. H. Prynne’s Biting the Air. Taking as a departure point Adorno’s idea of the role of art in society, it is argued here that Prynne’s sequence of poems thematises a conflict between the supremacy of the science- and market-oriented narratives of suppression of society and the attempts to subvert that narrative through a reinvention of the signifying process of language. Prynne resorts to radical parataxis in order to undermine the ostensibly natural hegemony of accepted idioms of science and market economy, offering a dense network of meanings that cannot be reduced to a flat formula. ‘‘Art is the negative knowledge of the actual world”. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘Reconciliation under Duress” ‘‘We heard them and it was not in this word order”. J. H. Prynne, Word Order Neil Corcoran foresaw that J. H. Prynne’s poetry after Brass (1971) might run the risk of becoming so hermetic as to be virtually incomprehensible to all but the clique of ‘‘devoted explicators” (Corcoran 177). Boldly dismissive though he might sound, Corcoran does strike a point, since the first impression on reading Prynne is that his work adamantly and obdurately refuses to respond to any of the customary interpretive strategies and the woebegone reader is eventually impelled to profess ignorance of what the poems actually try to say. Paradoxically, this multifaceted lack of acquiescence in the traditional modes of reading constitutes a large part of the evocative power of these poems; they can hardly be approached with the methods of commentary that 5 focus, for instance, on the propositional content of particular images which, in a greater or lesser measure, eventually reveal a number of sustained messages. Instead, Prynne compels his readers to shed what they have come to regard as ‘‘their language” in favour of an entirely new reading experience and it is this experience that falls within the immediate ambit of this essay. I seek to explore Prynne’s search for the emancipation of language in his recent volume Biting the Air (2003) against the backdrop of Theodor Adorno’s discussion of the role of art in modernity. Only when this strategy of re-appreciation of idiom has been delineated will Prynne’s passionate involvement with and criticism of contemporaneity become transparent. The early Prynne affiliates himself with hermeneutical/phenomenologi- cal investigations that share much of their intellectual impetus with Martin Heidegger’s search for Being. As Anthony Mellors argues, underlining the poet’s affinity with the writings of Charles Olson, Prynne’s ‘‘path to the Real is through the space of the figural. That is, the interest in what is thought to be fundamental or basic is not marked by a pathological refusal of metaphor but [...] proceeds along a Heideggerian track that carries interpretational impasse towards a form of Dasein” (Mellors, Literal Myth... 43). This brings Mellors to the postulate that Prynne seeks to approach reality through language. Even in the earliest books like Kitchen Poems (1968) and The White Stones (1969) the poet understands that even if the real lies beneath the film of words, we have access to it solely through the idiom. It is in The White Stones in particular that Prynne formulates what may be considered to have become his principal technique in the volumes of the last twenty years; words carry in themselves a twofold potential, the literal and ‘‘earthly,” to refer it to Heidegger’s term from ‘‘The Origin of the Work of Art,” and the figurative which, similarly to Heideggerian ‘‘world,” opens up the path to the perception of the true reality of Being. Mellors notes that ‘‘in order to escape the empirical naivety of the false literal,1 the inheritance of (pejorative) meaning must be lifted up to a figural plane, there to be ‘concretized’ and made truly real again” (Mellors, Literal Myth... 45). The transition from the literal to the figural marks the passage to a mythical plane wherein the truth of Being may be apprehended and then brought back to the sphere of the literal. Prynne’s early poetics shares this premise with High Modernist employment of myth in such poets as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot; however, myth cannot be used as a framework for the process of the elucidation of man’s condition in late modernity because the stability of the concept, which derives from a transcendental certainty that there exists an ontological order that can be approached through poetic utterance, exposes it to the processes of reification inherent in Western culture. Mellors makes a pertinent point when he observes that ‘‘unlike T. S. Eliot, who could not see that the drive to mythic order was already a constituent of capitalist 6 dissociation of sensibility and not an alternative to it, Prynne is aware that a poetic of mythic synchronicities without complication will only buy into the rhetoric of the ‘market’ and the advertising executive” (Mellors, The Spirit of Poetry..